First, I want to give the Wrike team some kudos. Wrike has become an incredibly flexible platform and has developed tremendously over the years. The amount of functionality and customization available today is impressive, and I really appreciate the work that has gone into getting it to this point.
Recently, though, I’ve been pushing Wrike a bit closer to its limits—not intentionally, but while trying to build more advanced capacity reporting.
I’m curious whether there is currently a way to accomplish what I’m trying to do, and if not, I’d love to hear what the recommended workaround would be.
As someone who has spent quite a bit of time diving into the advanced reporting options, I built my own reporting logic around:
- Assigned effort within and above capacity
- Booked effort within and above capacity
- Available capacity
- Full capacity
The goal is to provide a high-level visual overview that allows leadership to quickly answer questions such as: How much capacity are we currently using? If we want to use the currently booked hours, how much can realistically fit within capacity? And how much of that booked work would flow over capacity?
After going through several workarounds, I eventually found a solution that worked. However, it made me wonder whether there could be a more intuitive way to build and reuse reporting functions.
Reusable Functions
One feature that I think could significantly expand the possibilities of advanced reporting would be the ability to create simple, single-purpose functions that can then be reused inside other functions.
For example, rather than having to repeatedly type the same calculation or logic throughout a complex bar chart/report configuration, it would be great to define a function once and reference it by its name within other functions.
I understand that something like this could potentially introduce debugging or dependency challenges. However, from a user perspective, I think it could make advanced reporting substantially easier to build, troubleshoot, read, and maintain.
It would also make workarounds much faster and more intuitive. Instead of repeatedly writing the same logic throughout a complicated rule set, users could build smaller building blocks and combine them into more sophisticated calculations.
Example
One issue I ran into was when comparing capacity and booked effort within the same reporting environment. Wrike appeared to be accounting for the user work schedule as the number of users + 1 for the role I was analyzing.
I was able to work around this with:
Total Capacity = [Total User Work Schedule Working Hours] - SUM([Total User Work Schedule Working Hours] / # of Users + 1)
This allowed me to effectively deduct the additional person that Wrike was accounting for in the report. However, a bit redundant when having to reference this number multiple times I would have to retype the logic for this number rather than referencing, for example, my own custom variable "Total Capacity"
The fact that I was ultimately able to find a workaround is actually part of why I think this functionality has so much potential. Wrike is flexible enough that I can get surprisingly far with the existing reporting tools. The challenge is that as the logic becomes more complex, the lack of reusable functions makes those solutions increasingly difficult to construct and maintain.
So my main question is: Is there currently a recommended way to accomplish reusable calculations/functions like this in advanced reporting? If not, is something along these lines being considered, or is there another workaround you would recommend?
Again, huge kudos to the team. The fact that I’m even able to push the reporting tools this far is a testament to how much Wrike has evolved.
